Dynamic Duo: Opt-in Mailing List and a Killer Newsletter
You've probably been hearing this. There are two things you can
use to grow your business the fastest on the Web these days (And no,
neither of them is search engine rankings...). The first is growing
an opt-in e-mail list, the second is sending an e-mail newsletter
to your list. [8]
Search engine rankings may be more important in our own industry than
Anne Holland, Publisher/CEO of MarketingSherpa.com,
suggests there, but she's still right-opt-in lists and e-newsletters
are awesomely powerful marketing instruments. DoubleClick's 2002 Consumer
E-mail Study seems to bear out the importance of both elements:
Permission-based e-mail continues to be an effective form of communication
for marketers and publishers. Trust between sender and consumer is
paramount, as consumers cite the "from line" as the most significant
motivational factor for opening an e-mail. E-mails are motivating
consumers to purchase both online and offline. While privacy is of
lesser concern than in the past, unsolicited e-mail volume is now
the greatest problem for consumers and marketers. [4]
An e-newsletter is just one of many forms of promotional opt-in advertising
mailers, but it offers unique advantages over a garden-variety e-mail
ad. Advertising guru David Olgilvy (1911-1999) once said, "There is
no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make
them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 percent
more readers." [7] While maybe 1-3% of recipients will open an ordinary
promotional e-mail and request further information, over 50 percent
will click on e-newsletter articles.
As Internet newsletter specialists, Tamara Halbritter and Kevin Sullivan
put it, "E-newsletter marketing is less intrusive than traditional
advertising. It provides an alternative that is more appealing to
most readers, and is more effective, because each e-newsletter delivers
value to your customers and prospects on a regular basis." [6] That
inherent value builds community, trust, loyalty, your brand, and makes
your list members actually want to receive the thing-there is no need
to spam. [2]. Value also implies the promise of invoking a viral marketing
mechanism that, once set off, can do you very significant good.
Killer Newsletters
Holland [8] identifies what she regards as the five top tips for getting
your e-mail newsletter opened, read, and acted upon: Your subject
line. It's critical for your e-mail newsletter to have a subject line
that makes people want to read more. They are looking for an excuse
to delete your newsletter-don't let them!
To HTML or not to HTML? Even if you decide to go 100% for HTML, you'll
need to create a text-only version for people who prefer text, and
for people who's e-mail systems can't accept HTML. Length and frequency.
The more frequent your newsletter is, the shorter it should be. People
will happily open a short "joke of the day" but almost no one wants
to get something longer than that every day!
Make it easy on the eyes. Set your word processor so you are writing
in the same format that it will appear in on recipient's screens.
For text-based newsletters that means 10 point courier running 60
characters across.
Tone and attitude. Make your tone personal and casual. Yes, even hard-nosed
businesspeople prefer a personal, even sometimes jokey, tone. It will
work far better than old-fashioned "corporate-speak."
That's the voice of experience. Research-based guidance can be found
in Consultants Nielsen Norman Group's recent survey of e-mail newsletters.
[11] That study drew several clear conclusions. "Users have highly
emotional reactions to newsletters which feel much more personal than
Web sites. In usability testing, success rates were high for subscribe
and unsubscribe tasks, but users were frustrated by newsletters that
demanded too much of their time." The high points of their findings
include:
High Nominal Usability. Our test users experienced unprecedented high
levels of task completion in their attempts to subscribe and unsubscribe
to the newsletters in the study: 78% for subscribing and 92% for unsubscribing.
Low Perceived Usability. Even though users were able to successfully
unsubscribe 92% of the time during the test sessions, they often refrained
from even trying to get off mailing lists that they didn't want any
more.
Speed Matters. On average across the newsletters we studied, the subscribe
process took five minutes, and the unsubscribe process took three
minutes. Even though these task times are not prohibitive, they are
much too long for the simple functionality that's involved. Extreme
Platform Diversity. E-mail newsletters have to contend with platform
diversity. Our test users were almost evenly distributed between AOL,
Hotmail, Netscape mail, Outlook, and Yahoo mail, and it is also common
to find people using Eudora, Lotus Notes, and a broad variety of mainframe
systems and variants of Unix mail.
Newsletters Must Be Simple. People get a lot of e-mail. They don't
have time to read a lot of text. Newsletters must be designed to facilitate
scanning. In our study, only 23% of the newsletters were read thoroughly.
The remaining newsletters were skimmed, read partly, or not even opened--a
fate that befell 27% of the newsletters.
Part 2: Doing Better
Sources & Resources...
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